Supermarket Lady

Supermarket Lady is the subject of a framed photograph that David Zetterberg keeps in view while working. More than a work of art, it becomes his recurring emblem of Death: an image against which he measures both his ideas and the direction of society.

Appearance and Social Meaning

The photograph shows Duane Hanson’s plastic sculpture of an obese woman in a pink top and turquoise skirt, pushing a trolley loaded to bursting. Curlers sit in her hair and a cigarette dangles from her mouth; her shoes barely cover swollen, aching feet. Her gaze is empty, and a violet mark on her exposed upper arm looks like a bruise. David wonders whether her husband beats her, though the image cannot confirm that possibility.

The full trolley sits in stark contrast with the woman’s worn appearance. David imagines the smell of cheap perfume mixed with supermarket sweat, making the figure seem attached to a whole ordinary environment rather than isolated as a decorative object. Its abundance of goods does not cancel the signs of exhaustion and possible violence.

David’s Recourse to the Image

Whenever his ideas dry up or hesitation sets in, David looks at the photograph. He understands the figure as Death and as something to struggle against: in his moral scheme, social tendencies that lead toward her image are evil, while those that lead away from it are better. The picture therefore functions as a private measure of creative direction as well as a social judgment.

While writing a comedy routine, David answers imagined criticism from the newspaper aloud and keeps working through a buzzing headache that he attributes to his conscience. After twenty minutes he has a passable routine, perhaps amusing if he can make enough of it, but the photograph offers no guidance. Its silence matters: the image is a touchstone, not a source of ready answers.

Identification and Significance

David’s relation to the figure shifts from judgment toward possible identification. He considers that he may be walking in her footsteps, or already sitting in her basket. That image unsettles the distance between the man evaluating a symbol of social failure and the person who may be caught inside the conditions it represents.

The photograph’s force comes from this tension. David uses it to draw a boundary between what he regards as evil and what is better, yet his uncertainty suggests that he cannot safely place himself outside the picture. Supermarket Lady remains fixed behind glass in its frame, but in David’s working life it repeatedly reopens the question of where he stands.